HAIKU DIALOGUE – Foreground Focus – Obfuscation (1)

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1. Thank you so much Alex for selecting my haiku ‘full moon through coconut leaves’. As most of the others commented, I too was uncertain about this very innovative theme ‘obfuscation’. Just thought of experimenting with it and I am delighted to see that it is acceptable and would love to get some comments.
   All the haiku you have selected are amazing and I learnt a lot from them.
   I particularly loved the following.
   Eva Limbach’s haiku shows the futility of war over territorial boundaries.

   after all those wars
   the fence
   around the cemetery
   Manoj Sharma’s poem shows how past memories linger even at late fifties and may be he wants to forget the past and start a new spiritual beginning when he steps into sixties.
   59th birthday
   I look back at the doors
   I didn’t close (Manoj Sharma, Kathmandu, Nepal) and the risk taking nature of women when it comes to marriage in Bona Santos’s the ‘wedding veil she ignores red flags ‘ .
   Thank you Alex once again for selecting mine and look forward to reading your commentary next week.

2. palm trees become
   ominous
   morning fog

3. Thank you all for your insights and for enjoying my poem. In this day & age of the easy access to instant gratification, we miss the small stuff that matters. Like Kathabela says, do we still pay pay attention?

   Thanks Alex for choosing my haiku to be a part of these wonderful selection. Kudos to all the poets. And as always, thanks kj & Lori for keeping this series going.

4. staining the asphalt black smell of rain

   Vandana Parashar
   India

   I suppose it’s common practice to rely on google to figure out what’s going on with a haiku. That’s what I did for this one. I wasn’t sure of the word “staining” and wondered “why not painting?” Google tells me that “staining” is the preferred technique, especially so with reference to the damage water accumulation can do to the installed asphalt. However, I also understand that staining should not be done while it is raining. Or else, the quality of the asphalt paving will be compromised. If that is the case and if that’s what the poet has in mind too, the image that comes to my mind is that she is having a “private” driveway paved and stained. While this is going on, she smells rain and worries about a barrier between her and her stained driveway. It’s the rain that obfuscates her plan. If this understanding is correct, then “private” is an important qualification. If it is a public road that is being paved with asphalt and the municipal authorities are at the job, it is unlikely that a private individual would worry much whether it rains or not. Such thoughts take me away from the world of haiku to that of economics (to which I happen to belong). The conflict between private and public goods is a major problem in political economy.

   Hope I make sense.

5. wall painting the dance of shadow-leaves

   What captures my attention is the compound expression “shadow-leaves”. I think there is a significant difference between “shadow-leaves” and “shadows of leaves”. The former expression reminds me of the Kurosawa movie “kagemusha”, the shadow-warlord/king. (I am not sure, but “musha no kage” could be more like “shadows of leaves”. Both are shadows, but one seems like a real shadow and the other unreal.) Real shadow is a strange expression of course. But the beauty of your poem appears to lie in the distinction drawn between a real shadow and an unreal shadow. Propelled by these thoughts, I interpreted the poem to be pointing out that the wall painting with its dancing shadow-leaves is a barrier standing in your way. It does not let you watch the dancing real shadows of the real leaves. Am I talking nonsense? Alternatively, going along with the spirit of the prompt, it’s possible that the poet is looking through the wall painting and watching the real dancing shadows of the real leaves.

6. Thank you again, Alex.

   Highlighting a few:

   unmindful
   of the fast car
   mating dragonflies

   Ravi Kiran

   The human wreckage of nature contrasting with our idyllic view of it; and our/their preoccupation with sex. Splat on the windshield. A season word in it, even.

   —

   rice paper butterfly
   shadow-white on
   sunlit blinds

   De Sousa Grace

   An harmonious arrangement of separated but related things in this moment without time — toriawase. The unexpected phrase ‘shadow–white’ gets the reader’s attention.

   —

   vanishing
   into the sea mist
   a fisherman’s footprints

   wanda amos

   Yūgen, the things we don’t see, with all the underlying associations of ‘fisherman’ and the sea. The old ways; religion even (esp. if you are Christian); fish, too; all vanishing into the obscure. The end of a story, or at least of a chapter? Or the beginning of one?..

   —

   calendar ‒
   between the days of the month
   only one marked

   Maria Cezza

   Readers left to write the story obfuscated between the lines. The significance of that day: a birth, a death, a diagnosis or decision due; the longing for a baby, or not, perhaps. Or perhaps the poet is so lonely even that she has only lunch with an aunt to look forward to. Possibly rather too open, but I enjoyed letting my mind roam over this one.

   —

   All of these are suggestive, detached, evocative yet without ‘obvious’ triggers of emotion, and rely on images.

7. Of course I am honoured to be among the top 75 or so entrants this time, but I remain unsure as to why. Was my reference recognized? Was it the image, the structure, or the semantics? I much prefer your second step, with the editor’s comments on a smaller, more selective set of submissions, which is much more informative.

   1. Unfortunately, it would be almost impossible to offer valuable commentary on every single poem that gets selected, so only a handful are set aside for that purpose. However, I do try to respond to a few others here in the comments when people bring them up, and since you have specifically asked for commentary on your submission, I’ll explain my thinking when I added it to the acceptance file.

      oscillations
      my wife
      and my mother-in-law

      To answer your questions, I didn’t pick up on any reference/allusion in the poem, but I did appreciate the structure, opening with an interesting one-word fragment (“oscillations”) which is then juxtaposed with the wife and her mother. The poem made me laugh — it felt like a fresh way of expressing an old idea about the fluctuating resemblance between spouses and their parents. I thought it connected to the theme of “obfuscation,” considering the ambiguity presented between the wife/parent. I’m not sure if I misread your intentions or failed to pick up on an intended reference, but this was how I experienced the poem and why I decided it was a good fit for the column. Hope that helps.

8. Sorry it should have been haiku

9. Thank you for selecting my haku

10. Applauding these three wonderful poets

    For their fresh fresh lively awareness and expression. Bona’s haiku eye-opening I’m its simplicity and strength. Age old afvice…pay attention to red flags! But do we??

    Tha k you Alex for so richly engaging in this doLogue and all your thoughts and sharing of your own experience. I realize more and more a sensitive ffortless approach is really not to overthink or obfuscate our own reactions but to simply feel look and listen. Sometimes even a really simple moment can be obscured by over working

    wedding veil
    she ignores
    all the red flags

    Bona M. Santos
    Los Angeles, California

    Jackie is able to identify this practice as fitting this theme;

    of paying attention and using rather than being irritated by distractiond( We do this at our own meetings!

    Zoom meeting
    background noise becomes
    a part of our poems

    Jackie Chou

    USA

    and the delight of delights…eating the strawberry with Tomislav Maretic! Before that famous old zen tiger gets us.

    tigers getting closer. . .
    but the strawberry,
    how sweet it was!

    Tomislav Maretić
    Zagreb, Croatia

11. So many amazing haiku – had difficulty finding a favourite!

    after all those wars
    the fence
    around the cemetery

    Eva Limbach
    Deutschland
    ….so poignant in these troubled times!

    and

    wall painting the dance of shadow-leaves

    Srini S
    India
    ……. I watch this every morning and have yet to come up with a haiku – so lovely!

    Thank you Alex for publishing my haiku – and choosing so many beautiful haiku

12. Thank you, Alex, for the wonderful selections. There were so many beautiful haiku on this topic. I loved this one. It left me mesmerized, on a beach, realizing that the impermanence of all living things, is, perhaps, the greatest obfuscation we face.

    vanishing
    into the sea mist
    a fisherman’s footprints

    wanda amos
    Old Bar, Australia

13. Thanks for selecting a poem of mine, Alex, and thanks also for your comments, Sari and simonj. I’m glad my poem resonated with you as much your poems and those of all the others have resonated with me.

    Reading everyone’s work and subsequent comments has helped to “crack the code” of the obfuscation prompt. I’m looking forward to reading the remaining selections and comments based on this prompt next week and seeing what the new challenging prompt will be.

    By the way, since writing my poem (with helpful sounding-board advice from my wife), I’ve been working on an expository essay (NOT a haibun) about the obfuscation (i.e., confusion and gaslighting) I faced as a directionless teenager growing up in the mid-1960s. The essay includes brief stories about (1) baseball games I could only listen to on my pocket radio, (2) a youth Bible revival I attended in person at the baseball stadium I so wished to see baseball games in, and (3) a national political campaign for which my mom and I worked as volunteers and during which we had an unexpected encounter with the candidate near the campaign’s end.

    My poem served as a catalyst for the essay and is used as the essay’s epigraph. Here’s the opening paragraph:

    “Back in the 1960s, I’d fall asleep while listening to pop tunes turned down low on one of the little tinny transistor radios my parents had given to my sister and me. And 60 years on, I still retain a fond, but fuzzy memory of also listening on my radio to Columbus Jets minor league baseball games.”

    I’m writing these types of spur-of-the-moment nostalgic essays in my retirement to share with my kids and a few remaining old friends. This one is titled, “Summer of ‘64: The Confessions of a Confused and Gaslit Teenager.” Writing them is fun to do, especially because I’m not worried about sending them anywhere to be published, except maybe an inbox. I highly recommend writing little essays to share with family and friends and as an additional therapeutic activity to solving the daily Wordle (which, by the way, might be another obfuscation?).

    1. Sorry about a typographical error in the first paragraph. I left out the word “as.”

       “Thanks for selecting a poem of mine, Alex, and thanks also for your comments, Sari and simonj. I’m glad my poem resonated with you as much AS your poems and those of all the others have resonated with me.”

    2. Thank you for sharing, Richard. Your essay sounds fascinating. And what a wonderful gift for friends and family to receive these detailed dives into your life and thoughts. I think this is a good practice for anyone to keep.

14. summer window view:
    the gray overlay of smoke
    dimming the blue sky
    /
    Lorraine Schein
    Queens, New York
    /
    This haiku is quite relatable since the Canadian wildfires have triggered an air quality alert where I live, in Ohio.

15. Möbius strip-
    the pencil stroke
    inside and outside
    /
    nastro di Moebius-
    il tratto di matita
    dentro e fuori
    /
    Angiola Inglese
    Italy
    /
    /
    I always enjoy a mathematical haiku.

16. there all along the solitary bees

    Brilliant from Keith Evetts. Fantastic use of singular vs plural to demonstrate what we see but don’t see – the essence of haiku. A Touchstone-worthy haiku!

    1. Gosh — thanks, John. That means such a lot.

17. Wow, Alex, honored to be included amongst so many excellent selections. I’m glad my going only with obfuscation worked out as later I worried it had to be ekphrastic. Silly me, you always choose such a brilliant array.

    Right away, I was stopped in my tracks by

    after all those wars
    the fence
    around the cemetery

    Eva Limbach
    Deutschland

    Powerful enough on its own. It packed an even bigger punch seeing where it’s poet was from.

18. Thank you, Alex, for including my poem! I wasn’t sure what exactly I was supposed to write, so I just wrote what the picture told me.

    I loved this one by Tomislav Maretić, involving more than one sense organ.

    tigers getting closer. . .
    but the strawberry,
    how sweet it was!

    Zagreb, Croatia

    1. Many people seem to agree that the obfuscation prompt was quite… obfuscated. But there were many wonderful submissions, anyway, so I think it all worked out. I liked your ekphrastic approach that brought the scent of cinnamon to this week’s fare.

       Maretić’s poem is an allusion to a Zen koan about a man hanging on the side of a cliff by a vine, a tiger waiting above and a tiger waiting below to eat him while a mouse is slowly gnawing through the vine. And in that moment in which most people would be panicked, he spots a ripe strawberry, plucks it, and finds joy in eating it. The allusion works well with the theme, too, I think, as the tigers nearly obfuscate the pleasures that can be found in the moment, and perhaps they would have for another. But Maretić reminds us not to obsess over the existential dread of what we can’t avoid and find the strawberry in front of us while we can.

       1. Thank you for explaining the allusion, Alex. I liked it before, but now I love it!

19. pocket radio
    somewhere in the static
    a ballgame

    Richard Straw

    Recollections of when I were a lad…

20. There were a few similar submissions concerning red flags or the idea of red flags (one of which you will see next week!). The other one up above is:
    .
    a few autumn leaves
    the red flags
    I never saw
    .
    Marianne Sahlin
    Sweden
    .
    For this one, I appreciated the connection between red flags and red leaves. Someone maybe feeling the autumn of their life (or just the ending of a period of time) looking back regretfully on the things she didn’t notice until it was too late.

    Santos’s poem is similar but the perspective is from someone who is actively ignoring things that will cause problems down the road, whereas Sahlin’s poem is someone from the point of view of someone who has already suffered the consequences. The two work together like before and after images.

    And I agree with your comments on Straw’s poem–it’s always refreshing when senses other than sight create the effect, especially when they’re accomplished so well.

21. Congratulations to all the poets who were not as confused by the prompt as I was. There are so many haiku here that helped explain the idea of obfuscation well. Though I understood it in principle, the haiku chosen make it clearer; thanks.

    I particularly loved Angiola’s
    Mobius strip-
    the pencil stroke
    inside and outside

    I love the idea of the Mobius strip for the way it works. It’s rather like an eutectic mixture in pharmaceutical compounding. Two solids when mixed becoming a liquid. Now that I write this, a haiku is in the works.

    Thanks Alex for choosing one of mine, seeing something in it. Again, congratulations to all.

    1. Hi, Nancy. There were multiple reasons poems were accepted for this prompt. For instance, some poems were chosen because they seemed to be interacting with the artwork itself, and others were chosen because of their take on the topic of obfuscation more generally. I found your poem to be an effective ekphrastic haiku inspired by the provided artwork–one thing (such as an X, or wings) over another thing (such as a background, or a nest). I also thought there was some ambiguity as to what the bird is doing there–is the nest home, or is the bird hoping to infiltrate another’s home? Why is it hovering there? So I thought it worked with the theme.

       1. Thanks Alex for explaining your choices. I thought the non-ekphrastic ones really showed what you were looking for and made the idea of obfuscation clearer in my mind. I learned from reading them, and isn’t that the point, or at least one of points, of this column and website? To learn and grow as we make our way through the world of haiku, and by extension, life? I would like to think so, at least for myself. Ancora imparo.

          Thanks again for selecting mine, and for reading the many haiku you do. It’s not easy. Thanks too to Kathy and Lori for their expertise helping guest editors. They are invaluable.

    2. Thanks to Alex for sharing my .
       And thanks to Nancy Brady who appreciated it… I too didn’t quite understand what we had to write to show this “obfuscation”, then I let myself slide over this tape which always fascinates me and which I really liked to present in class to the my pupils.
       The hiku presented were very beautiful, in particular I really liked the image of the Po Valley entering through the window, proposed by Danela Misso.

       1. Thank you, Angiola for commenting on my haiku! Your haiku caught my eye, too.
          Congratulations to all the poets here! A stunning selection.

22. Thank you Alex for including my haiku this week. And much thanks to Kathy and Lori for all your work on this Haiku Dialogue which I look forward to each week. Congratulations to all the poets here. So so much great work. I love this haiku, the bridal veil conveys multilayered symbolism and the language play of the “red flags” is wonderful:

    wedding veil
    she ignores
    all the red flags

    Bona M. Santos
    Los Angeles, California
    This one is special to me in how it uses hearing, a sense other than sight, on the theme of obfuscation. It is just a precious haiku pulling up so many memories but also of the moment:
    pocket radio
    somewhere in the static
    a ballgame

    Richard Straw

    1. There were a few similar submissions concerning red flags or the idea of red flags (one of which you will see next week!). The other one up above is:
       .
       a few autumn leaves
       the red flags
       I never saw
       .
       Marianne Sahlin
       Sweden
       .
       For this one, I appreciated the connection between red flags and red leaves. Someone maybe feeling the autumn of their life (or just the ending of a period of time) looking back regretfully on the things she didn’t notice until it was too late.

       Santos’s poem is similar but the perspective is from someone who is actively ignoring things that will cause problems down the road, whereas Sahlin’s poem is someone from the point of view of someone who has already suffered the consequences. The two work together like before and after images.

       And I agree with your comments on Straw’s poem–it’s always refreshing when senses other than sight create the effect, especially when they’re accomplished so well.

       1. Thank you for choosing my haiku, Alex, and for this comment on it. I really liked Santos’s “before image”, and I am now looking forward to the third poem concerning the idea of red flags.

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